App.net Just Went From Twitter Clone To A Scale Model Of Something Much, Much More

When Dalton Caldwell launched App.net (aka ADN) in August, to the naked eye it appeared to be a clone of Twitter with the twist that users had to pay for the privilege. The service has attracted 32,000 users in those six months, heavily weighted towards developers and tech insiders. But the fact that App.net has started as a niche product belies the much more expansive vision that is behind the service.

The starting point of this agile enterprise was to build a very rudimentary micro-blogging platform, similar to Twitter. The client that ADN itself build, called "Alpha," was pretty bare bones, but the APIs that made it tick were accessible to anyone with a developer account. And, indeed, in that same six months, these developers created more than 100 apps for the platform, including mobile clients for iOS, Android and even Windows Phone and Symbian, desktop apps for Mac, Windows and Linux and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. One app, Tweeter, even "quietly slips App.net posts into your Twitter stream, for those of us who are still kicking the habit." Caldwell is proud to say that the app created per user ration on App.net is unprecedented.

The first real inkling of where this was going was when ADN announced its new file API a month ago. All users were given a 10 GB allotment of file storage that could be accessed through this API by apps built for the platform. All of a sudden, developers were not just limited to micro-blog posts and private messages (added in December), but any kind of app that relied on file storage like photo sharing, group collaboration as well as personal data organization.

But since everyone also has a Dropbox account, or an iCloud account or a Google Drive account, why do you need another bucket of file storage in the cloud? This is the central point around which ADN revolves. Caldwell is a proponent of what is known as "unbundling." Followers of the elusive "connected TV" and the vaporous Apple iTV will recognize this concept from discussions about how consumers might prefer to "unbundle" the channels and even individual programs from their bloated cable plans. And by now, we know how that story goes. The cable companies are too entrenched and making too much money to risk disrupting their gravy train.

Whether or not this is ultimately true for interactive television or not, on the wider internet we have "bundling," but with less entrenched business models. The problem with the current situation is that in return for the convenience of Facebook, or your iPhone or your Google Glass, you give up control of the data that you produce using these products. From a sonsumer experience perspective, there is a good argument for this. Everybody wants things to be easy and if you make things too complicated for users they will go elsewhere. This is, by the way, the same argument that has led to the rise of "free" services. No one is willing to pay for anything and if you try to charge people they will go elsewhere.

App.net stands in stark contrast to this on both accounts. Caldwell asks us to, "Imagine a world in which your social data (e.g. messages, photos, videos) was easier to work with. For instance, imagine you could try out a new photo sharing service without having to move all of your photos and social graph. In this world, your photos are held in a data store controlled by you. If you want to try out a new service, you can seamlessly login and choose to give permission to that service, and the photos that you have granted access to would be immediately available." In return for managing a little complexity (which well-designed apps should make approach zero, anyway) and a modest monthly or yearly fee, an "unbundled" service "Gives the user power to pick the software that best suits their needs, rather than being forced to use the software made by the company that manages their data."

But building a large community of paying users is difficult if potential users cannot try the service out. And since one of the primary ways that social services grow is through the recommendation of a content shared from friends, colleagues and acquaintances, a paywall can be a serious inhibitor to growth. So, after half a year of slow, controlled growth that has built a robust developer community, Caldwell has decided to open the spigot with the familiar freemium model.

To get a free account, you still must be invited by an Starting today, App.net member with a yearly account can invite people to get a free account, with no time limit. These free accounts will only be able to follow a maximum of 40 users (vs. unlimited for paid accounts), will only have 500 MB of free file storage (vs. 10 GB for paid accounts) and will only be able to upload files with a maximum size of 10 MB (vs. 100 MB for paid accounts.) In a viral twist familiar to users of Dropbox, new free members can earn additional file storage by inviting friends and encouraging them to follow five or more people and authorize a third-party app.

One point here is to get new people to get involved in the platform so that they begin to see the possibilites that this new model offers them. The other, is to make ADN even more attractive to developers because there will be a larger pool of users to market apps to. Like every other step that the company has made up to this point, it will take some time for the implications of its actions to become clear, but I think they could be profound.

I interviewed Caldwell last week and will be posting a story about what I see as the wider implications of App.net, and unbundling in general, tomorrow. In brief, Caldwell is part of a larger trend that is trying to apply the way developers think about the digital world to products that can be easily used by non-technical consumers. These attempts buck the more general trend in the app-o-verse of insulating users from any direct contact with their own data or any sense of how much control they could actually exert upon it, given the slightest effort. This prevailing wind has led to explosive growth for many services, but in the coming consolidation I see a renewed emphasis on utility over engagement for its own sake. App.net aims to be part of that crosswind.